"Life goes on forever, but death is instantaneous.
"There aren't enough novels in the world to contain the vast grey soup of words uttered in a single life, but a death will fit neatly inside a page, a sentence, even the white space between a period and a capital letter.
"As much as life is soft and relenting— meandering, death is crude and unforgiving, as efficient as a jackhammer on a floor of glass, as a frog's tongue on the back of a stamp, as a hot razor blade on a quivering egg white."
I wrote this when I was much younger, a spry 39-year-old. It was to be the dialogue of an ideologue, a smarter character, perhaps the villain, in a noir fantasy novel that I never wrote.
Looking back at it now, I can't help but smile. The subject at hand, death, is not so sexy and/or dire as I once dramatically posited. Perhaps, to some, it is as fast, but never as cool.
Yesterday, I exited my house like I do every morning and allowed my cane to walk me to the mailbox. I waved hello to my neighbors, the wheelchair gang across the street at River Meadows. (I refused long ago, by contract, to be admitted into that saggy skinned nursery and my son Beck has since respected my decision, by moving me into a nice home across the street and fixing me with a contraption that alerts the nurses working a lawn and a lobby away if my vitals go FUBAR.) Then I turned around with a hand full of mail— junk ads since all the heartfelt and personal mail is delivered directly into my optic nerve now. (In fact, even the junk ads are fake. I pay someone to send them. Its a terribly un-environmental program designed to help old fogies like myself reconnect emotionally with the "good old days" of our youth.)
The rest of my day is spent in three parts. Part one, connecting myself to the WNM, the waste and nutrient machine, for just that. Read: shitting while I pop nutritional pills instead of food. A horrid contraption simultaneously stimulates both major orifices in my body, thus tidily managing the two messiest parts of the human energy cycle in a five-minute, maximumly efficient daily process. I will feel full above and dry below for the rest of the day. Part two, I will use my auto-cise machine for 30 minutes, which will keep me in shape with minimum effort on my own part. This machine includes a bonus "shower", which I call the carwash, at the end. Part three, I will write, through OptiScribe, using my eyes and my brain, while sipping mineral water from my 1990s Garfield collector's glass mug for another seven hours. Then one more two-minute trip to the first machine, and sleep.
I am both a more accomplished, and less interesting writer than I used to be. I have sold so many books I can't even remember all the names of them any more. The first dozen are classics, issued into teenage hands for reading homework in Middle School English classrooms across North America, and even a few across the world. Twenty or so novels later, I felt my writing wane. The stories didn't lose their color, but the colors I painted them with became tacky, borrowed, frankensteins of my own ideas and the movie I had watched at two in the morning the night before on the OptiSphere. I still derived some pleasure from the first drafts, but the editing was torture and I hated finishing them. (Finishing my works used to be the deepest form of pleasure!) Yet, they were New York Times best sellers. They sold out faster than the classics that I am famous for.
As I was finishing my latest book, which is in fact about the subject of death, I came across this errant Word file on an old USB hard drive, no doubt written in the age of laptops. It was simply the aforementioned text in quotations. Juvenile, but fun. I loaded it into OptiScribe and tinkered around with the wording and added it to the last chapter, in the second to last paragraph of your own Henry Logan's "The Slow Hereafter".
In its new form, it goes, "Life goes on forever, and so does death.
"There aren't enough novels in the world to contain the vast grey soup of words uttered in a single life, and not enough novels in the world to describe all the thoughts one has in their first moments of death.
"As much as life is soft and steady— pushing mysteriously towards a shift of form, death is even more unannounced and shadowy, as efficient as a smattering of rainclouds swarming up behind you, as a frog sitting complacently in a slowly warming pot of water, as a fair maiden or cowhand with poison lipstick, tucking you into the softest woolen blanket."
As I etched out the final paragraph through my optic nerve, I pretended to fall from life itself. At my age, I probably risked truly doing so. It went as such: "I do not know, even now, if I lie below that blanket, in that heating pot, or squarely below those rainclouds. The edge is not an edge, but a blur. Perhaps it is here. Perhaps I am talking to you already from the other side.
"Oh. Hello."
I turned it into my publisher last month and it hit the shelves yesterday. Already, I am getting quite a buzz about this one. "A return to form," is one of the popular review headlines. Let me see if there are any negative ones. Erase previous thought. Wait, what's that noise? The sound of a jackhammer and broken glass. Call 911. Operator, a young man has broken through my window with a jackhammer and he— listen: "The frog has left the pot"? In his right hand he holds a frog, a stamp. And in his left— Please. No! My eye—
Oh. Hello.
